Wiretapping Lies Continue, This Time in the NY Post

Monday’s New York Post ran a story by bureau chief Charles Hurt blaming a delay on finding information about captured soldiers in Iraq on the privacy framework that protects Americans from unfettered surveillance.

The biting story, based on a leak from an administration-friendly source, blames bureaucratic rules for a 10-hour delay in getting permission for the NSA to set up a wiretap inside American telecom switches to capture Iraqi communications — hours that could have meant the difference between life and death for the soldiers.

Hurt’s piece, relying on a “senior congressional staffer with access to the classified case” is quite compelling, but would be even more so if it weren’t a carefully constructed, politically motivated lie that’s already been discredited.

The back story: On May 12, insurgents with likely ties to Al Qaeda-sympathetic elements in Iraq attacked an American position, killing four soldiers and capturing three others. The NSA and other intelligence groups launched an immediate operation to locate the soldiers and listen in on their captors’ communications.

Hurt takes it from there.

But it soon ground to a halt as lawyers – obeying strict U.S. laws about surveillance – cobbled together the legal grounds for wiretapping the suspected kidnappers.

Starting at 10 a.m. on May 15, according to a timeline provided to Congress by the director of national intelligence, lawyers for the National Security Agency met and determined that special approval from the attorney general would be required first.

For an excruciating nine hours and 38 minutes, searchers in Iraq waited as U.S. lawyers discussed legal issues and hammered out the “probable cause” necessary for the attorney general to grant such “emergency” permission.

And did it take 10 hours to come up with this so-called “probable cause” and then afterwards get an official in the Justice Department to sign off on an emergency warrant that would let the surveillance start 3 days before an application actually had to be submitted to a acquiescent, secret spying court?

Actually, yes, though a timeline provided by the government shows that most of the delay was due to the Justice Department’s own dithering for hours AFTER the NSA notified the Justice Department that it had enough for an emergency order.

And even after that, the Justice Department couldn’t find any of its top officials to sign off on the order for two hours, in part because then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was in Texas. While every major ISP and phone company in the United States has a 24-hour wiretap hot line, the Justice Department seems not to.

Furthermore, Hurt writes that the NSA needed to get on the U.S. switches because “the FISA law applies even to a cellphone conversation between two people in Iraq, because those communications zip along wires through U.S. hubs, which is where the taps are typically applied.”

Hurt finishes with a quote from Maria Duran, the mother of Alex Jimenez, one of the soldiers who hasn’t been found and is presumed dead.

“You know that this is how this country is – everything is by the law. They just did not want to break the law, and I understand that. They should change the law, because God only knows what type of information they could have found during that time period.”

Actually as we’ve found out over the last six years, everything isn’t by the law in this administration. And in this case, it wasn’t the law, rather the administration’s own inept bureaucracy, that kept the NSA from working to find a captured American soldier.

And that yellow journalistic preying on a grieving mother to further the administration’s continuedefforts to mislead the American people is yet another illustration of how a significant and powerful contingent of this country’s so-called journalists remain willing to get on their knees and serve an administration that believes itself to be above the law and too virtuous for oversight.

Such sycophantic journalists believe the government should have the power to turn the nation’s phone and internet systems into their own private microphones, with no checks to ensure they don’t listen in on ordinary Americans who are endowed by the Constitution with the right to free speech and the right to be free from unreasonable snooping on their communications.

The story might tug at your heart strings, but it’s a lie that reaches from Hurt’s keyboard to your eyes.